What gains in 20 years?

SOUTH Africa celebrates 20 years of democracy on Sunday, making this year’s elections even more critical than perhaps when we attained this freedom. It’s been a 20 years of the ruling ANC at the helm but other than the carefully scribed “we’ve got a good story to tell”, there’s nothing much to say for this democracy.

Actually things have in a way gone from bad to worse.

If the people of this country do not use this opportunity to make their voices heard then indeed this, to me, is the last shot before things go horribly wrong.

We are, as a country, on a tipping point of a place of no return.

We are 20 years into this big lie called democracy. Instead of our leaders working tirelessly to abolish crimes against our people such as corruption and lack of accountability by our excuses of leaders, all we see is a gang of people calling themselves leaders who are doing everything in their powers to protect the rot within government and the private sector.

Things have gone so horribly wrong that even ANC leaders do not have any defence anymore because they cannot defend certain leaders without contradicting themselves and looking like fools to those they are trying to canvass for the upcoming elections.

I have had the privilege to engage at a sane level with some of the ruling party’s leaders from all walks of life who believe that something along the way went terribly wrong. Right now what matters to them is that the people of this country must vote the ANC and forget about this or that leader.

Today the ANC as a party has a leader it cannot really trust or respect, but because the rot has been there and ignored for sometime, hoping it will go away, there’s nothing the party can do about it. Here is an ANC that has completely lost on the moral stakes.

Here is an ANC whose No 1 has only become “better and better” with very scandal he’s been embroiled in.

This is not the ANC that I, as a young South African who, though I have never been into party politics, admired.

As a kid I had grown to know the role that this movement, captained by selfless skippers like Anton Lembede, Oom Govan Mbeki, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and many other selfless cadres I cannot mention for space purposes, stood for.

It’s a pity that the present day ANC, having been entrusted with power by the mostly poor and desperate people of this country, still has to dig deep for a good story to tell. I shudder to think what the now dearly departed A team is thinking in their graves and about how their names have been made so cheap as the election campaign gains momentum just a few weeks before the elections.

There is no way that Nelson Mandela, Mbeki, Tambo and others are resting in peace in their graves with some people in this country still living in abject poverty when ANC leaders are wearing sunglasses.

They build a few solid houses for the poor, while others have parties in their mansions popping champagne and whisky bottles worth thousands.

The ruling party has no business using Mandela to con people into voting for it come May 7.

Twenty years on this is not the country that Mandela and his comrades had in mind.

They would have never thought there would be a leader who would be found to have slept on duty while his private compound was pimped up to look like a rap mogul’s sex den.

All that leader would say was that he was not informed of it all and as such couldn’t be held liable. What leader says that? Twenty years into democracy I shouldn’t be walking the streets of a free South Africa and fearing for my life because young people my age are hungry and feel like mugging me.

They do this because they have been let down by a government that sees them as nothing short of an irritation.

Twenty years on there shouldn’t be people my mother’s age wandering the streets without any hope and having been reduced to beggars who will even go as far as selling their bodies for a piece of bread.

This while leaders are allegedly checking into expensive hotels and lodges with teenage girls and loose desperate women of the night just to feed their dirty fantasies.

As we enter this year’s elections in two weeks’ time I urge all South Africans to consider their votes very carefully and think not only for themselves but generations that come after them.

Do not buy into struggle songs, pop music and food parcels as politicians tell you there’s a good story to tell. What good story? You wouldn’t need food parcels and party shirts if indeed there was a good story to tell. The revolutionary songs won’t give you employment, won’t give you education or a house to sleep in. Or dignity, for that matter.